Wanderers of the Night
by Shimmertail
Summary: See them, the children of the shadows. He, the boy who waltzes through the darkness and knows its secrets. She, the starlight girl who tethers them to the world of the dawn. Seven moments in Lily and Snape's lives in the dark.
1. First Year

_See them, the children of the night, they who cast off their smiling masks when the sunlight deserts the land of the living and leaves them to the mercy of their nightmares._

Hogwarts is dark at night, Lily quickly discovers, only the enchanted torches lighting her path through the corridors. She moves silently on bare feet, emerald eyes avoiding the curious stares of the portrait occupants. Their whispers, feather-soft words sweetened with poison, seem like the buzzing of mosquitoes in the aphotic gloom.

Lily begins to run.

Each breath is a gasping sob, shallow and terrified, and tremors wrack her tiny frame from head to toe. The castle is still strange to her, still foreign in its long, twisty corridors and tricky staircases like Orpheus' shadowy path to Hades. The first classroom she comes upon is empty, and she enters without hesitation.

She curls up here, cowering in the corner of this deserted classroom and wondering if the Sorting Hat had chosen wrong for her. Surely a Gryffindor is afraid of nothing, just as surely as she is a coward.

The castle is cold, much colder than her bedroom at home. The smooth stone floors are like ice in the autumn chill, and the redheaded girl shivers despite herself.

"Lily?"

Ah, and there he is. Her protector. She turns, bottle-green eyes bright with unshed tears, and offers him a small, watery smile. "Sev. What are you doing here?"

If she had not already grown used to him and his uncanny knack for vanishing into the shadows, she would have perhaps mistaken him for one of those fancies of an imaginative mind that lurks so secretly in the dark for only one to see. But she has grown used to his disappearances, had become accustomed to it long ago, and she smiles as he steps in the wavering torchlight. He wears his nightclothes as well, dark garments the same shade as his inky hair, but to Lily, he seems a knight in armor all agleam.

For half a moment, he seems flushed under the flickering glow of the enchanted flames, but it disappears before Lily has a chance to ponder its meaning, replaced by a grin. "I was looking around. Have you seen the dungeons? They're brilliant, Lily, really fantastic. You'll see them tomorrow when we go to Potions."

He pauses, his smile fading just as quickly as it had appeared as he notes her shining eyes, her hiccupy breathing, her slight trembling. "What is it?" She can hear the concern in his voice mounting, each word edged with worry and anger at whatever has upset her, and she almost smiles. These are the times when she considers how lucky she is to have a friend like Severus.

"I don't like it here, Sev." There it is, the truth at last. There is no one else she would trust with her doubts, not her parents in an owl and certainly not her new roommates, practically strangers. No, her best friend and the night itself are her only confidants when she speaks these dark words, and she likes it just fine that way.

Seeing his wide-eyed expression, she continues in a soft, tremulous voice more like her older sister's than her own. "Everything's so _different_ here. So new. I don't know any of the people I room with, and I miss home. I miss my parents and my room and our special place by the river." A sad smile flits across her features. "I even miss Tuney."

She looks up at him anxiously, seeking something, even though she isn't sure what. Reassurance, perhaps? And before she can stop it, her greatest fear is slipping off her tongue and into the open. "I'm not brave at all, Sev. What if the Sorting Hat chose wrong? What if I'm too much of a coward to be in Gryffindor?"

Her companion's features contort into some emotion she doesn't recognize on him, and as he crouches down beside her, she cannot help but notice how gaunt his features seem when darkened by shadow and the bruises that linger on his face as the darkness passes.

She feels his fingers are just as cold as hers as he takes her hand, and the intensity of his gaze is almost frightening. "Never say that again. You have _never_ been a coward, Lily, and you'll never be one."

His voice is low and severe, and his words have edges sharp as razor blades. She is used to his mood swings, but even this surprises her. "Sev..." she whispers, squeezing his hand, and he seems to snap back out of his black mood.

"I'm sorry, but...you just can't say that, Lily. You're the bravest person I've ever met." Severus shakes his head. "You're not a coward, and you never will be."

Lily almost smiles before remembering the problem at hand. "I just...I don't know if I'm going to get used to Hogwarts. It's different for me than everyone else. Some of the other students, the Slytherins...you didn't see how they stared at me, Sev. Like I was dirty, or didn't belong her."

"Lily," he sighs, and it seems to the redhead that his voice carries the worries of the entire world. "Don't pay attention to them. They don't know you; they don't know anything." He squeezes her hand, and his black-as-pitch eyes are intent on hers again.

"I'm going to make you a promise, but you have to make me one too. I want you to swear that you'll never let anyone call you a coward, even yourself. Do that, and I promise that I'll protect you from everything."

Lily smiles and embraces the boy crouched beside her. A few tears leak from her eyes, but she pays them no mind. In the morning light, she will go back to being the first-year Gryffindor, and Hogwarts will return to its usual alien menace. But here, in the cloak of midnight and torchlight, with Sev's promise ringing in her ears, she knows that she won't be afraid.

She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, ending her tears, and she smiles into the fabric of her best friend's shirt. "You'll really protect me, Sev?"

He remains rigid in surprise at the unexpected hug, but she feels his arms slide around her and return the embrace. "Always."


	2. Second Year: Snape

_See him, the lone figure in the gloom, he who finds his solace in the hours where no light dares show its bright face and holds no fear for the things that lurk unseen._

The book in his hands is old and worn, the parchment thin and brittle from age. The margins are graffitied with layers of scribbled writing from years of students past, and several pages have obviously been ripped out.

Sitting in an abandoned room as he hunches over the book and attempts to make out a particularly faded passage, Severus hopes that they are not the very ones he has been searching for.

Night protects him, here in his stygian castle of molding textbooks and potion's fragrant fumes. It cloaks him from the rest of the world, from the light where he is nothing but a misplaced shadow, a darkness so obviously a glaring mistake in that world of brightness and beauty. It shuns him, that light, but he makes it through each day all the same, if only to see those brilliant green eyes as they catch the morning sunlight.

He sighs at that thought, slamming the ancient tome shut in defeat. Lily. She wouldn't approve of this, not at all. But it is necessary, and if the end justifies the means, surely she would understand? James Potter had simply gone too far.

His dark eyes narrow in anger. _James Potter._ Even the very name sets him on edge, makes him reflexively grit his teeth to keep from shouting the foulest curses he can dream of. The arrogant, conceited Gryffindor had been the bane of his existence since the very first day on the train, and he still lives up to that title on a daily basis. Severus had grown used to the pranks, the hexes, and the taunting, but Potter had gone too far yesterday. He had gone after Lily, and anger still burns him up inside every time he thinks of it.

She had cried. She had found him in the Great Hall and sobbed into his shoulder until there were no tears left to spill. Her hair had disappeared, every single scarlet strand. It rips him up inside, that she had wasted something as precious as her tears on James Bloody Potter. Severus hates him all the more for it, and for good reason.

The textbook closed, he moves from the stool he has occupied for the past three house, his muttered incantations and experimental movement all culminating in his mind. He stands, atramentous gaze scanning the room for a potential target. His eyes lock on to the tapestry across the room, some fanciful depiction of Merlin's prophetic visions of dragons, fire-spewing serpents of alabaster and vermilion dueling over the ancient sorcerer's head.

Yes, it would do just fine.

Slender fingers grip his birch wand tightly as he levels it with the arras hanging on the opposite wall. _This is_, he muses, _the beginning of a very great discovery or a very terrible accident. I suppose it's time to find out._

He mouths the incantation several times, not daring to say it out loud until it comes to mind smoothly and easily. The chance of the spell backfiring upon him is to great to risk stumbling over a syllable, not when a mistake can cost a limb or a life.

He closes his eyes, and a sobbing Lily Evans comes to mind, trying to cover her bare head before anyone notices. Madame Pomfrey had given her a potion to grow it back quickly, but she had still been bald for several hours before it began to take effect. And all because of Potter. Severus had sworn to protect her once, on their first night at Hogwarts, to protect her from anything that dared upset her. But where had he been when James Potter had hexed her? Had he been there to protect her from the stupid toerag? No, he had broken his promise. She had needed him, and he hadn't been there. James Potter had hurt her, made her cry, and he had done nothing to protect her or achieve vengeance.

He is as bad as the Gryffindor fiend, and a coward as well.

Jet eyes snap open, and his wand slashes through the air as if he is gutting Potter with a sword. "_Sectumsempra_!"

The word is a curse, a cry of anguish and fear and unfathomable fury. He pours his shadows into it, every imagined nightmare and thought of the blackest kind. It does not sound like Dark Magic to him, not to this boy of bottled pain and creeping shadows at dusk, not to he who both embraces the darkness and loves her piercing light until he is in sweet agony, forever caught between the two ends of the spectrum. To him, it sounds of Lily's justice and his revenge.

To him, it rings of his promise being restored once more, and that is a sound too sweet for him to find the poison lying beneath.

The light his wand emits is blinding, a white-gold so bright he has to squint. It fades just as quickly, and it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the stifling blackness of the room. He exhales a breath he had't realized he had been holding until now. Stowing his wand back into the pocket of his robes, he walks over to the tapestry for a closer inspection.

Both halves of the arras flutter in the enchanted breeze that circulates through the castle to keep it cool, ripped cleanly in half. The crimson and chalky dragons snarl at each other across the rift, now forever divided. Severed forever, he muses, the Latin running through his head. Sectum semper. _Sectumsempra_.

Yes, the beginning of a very great discovery indeed.

He is mildly surprised to find that he is still shaking in his post-incantation wrath, the rage boiling up until it covers him like a second skin. He takes a deep breath, trying to calm the fire inside him, but the oxygen only sends the flames of anger climbing higher still.

He pulls out his wand once more, although not to cast another curse. He closes his eyes, searching through his memories for those so few and far-between, the moments that he had truly been happy.

_The first time he had brewed a potion correctly._

_Casting his first spell with his mother's wand._

_Meeting the beautiful redheaded girl who could fly off the swings and make the flowers dance._

_Watching his father leave the house for good._

_Boarding the train to Hogwarts._

_Lily's smile. Lily's laugh. Lily's eyes, those beautiful green eyes that shine so brilliantly when she is happy._

"_Expecto Patronum_."

The light that fills the room this time is a soft silver as his Patronus emerges, starshine and moonlight spun into being like spider-silk. Legs form first from the shimmering mist, the long and slender legs of a creature meant to run free.

The light coalesces into a single shining figure, and Severus breathes a soft sigh of relief as the sense of calm envelopes him. The deer steps forward, bowing its antlerless head to him, and he gently rests his palm on the center of its brow. A Patronus' body is like water even when corporeal, not quite solid, but the cool surface beneath his palm is substantial enough.

Severus knows that he will not see Lily cast a Patronus until all his other classmates are taught in their seventh year, but he knows what he will see. Even as caught up in the spiderweb of his midnight realm as he is, he knows that Lily Evans will have a doe the same as his, and he knows that her Patronus' light will shine more brightly than his ever has.


End file.
